


Time Has Come To Make Things Right

by SoniaWilde



Category: Spartacus Series (TV), Spartacus: War of the Damned
Genre: Implied Future Character Death, M/M, Unspecified Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 18:38:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoniaWilde/pseuds/SoniaWilde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tiberius, son of Crassus, stands in front of him, watching him while he dies.</p>
<p>In a second Caesar feels like he has deserved every stabbing and, in the same second, past years are coming back to his eyes. He was still young, just a military tribune and Tiberius was just a guy who believed to have the world in his hands.</p>
<p>When was it? When did all that hate between them begin?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Has Come To Make Things Right

**Author's Note:**

> Author: MrBlackWeasley  
> Pairing: Julius Caesar/Tiberius Crassus (Spartacus WOTD)  
> Rating: PG13  
> Warning: Angst, One shot, AfterTheSeries Setting  
> Notes: On this rainy afternoon I took my computer, a bit of Muse as a soundtrack and I said to myself that I had to write something. I really had to. And this is the result, a historic angst fiction that probably doesn't make any sense. This ff is set on the famous day of the Ides of March and I hope I didn't make any historic mistakes. Plus, I wrote this in italian (my language) **before** I even know Tiberius would have been dead for the time. But I like it like this, so...enjoy it and, please, be forgiving!

The first stab arrives, direct to the dictator of Rome, and it hurts.

He knew that recently his work had not been so respected in the Senate; he knew that – as for all powerful men – the day has come in which nobody is around him but enemies, in which the persons who are loyal to you are fewer than the number of the hands the gods have granted to any man. 

Others stabbings arrive, confused voices are shouting everywhere. Bodies are over and all around him, everyone wants to leave a mark. Everyone, on this Ides of March, decides to be the main character. But where were all these main characters when the end of the Republic was near? Where were Cassius, Decimus and Lucius in Britain, in Gaul, or when Spartacus was overturning the natural order of things?

The plotters had just left him barely alive, twenty people against one, and the dark spot is becoming bigger in the eyes of Caesar, in the same eyes that fought thousands of battles and won thousands of uprisings. Eyes that have seen pain.

Caesar's eyes are still working though, even in the dark, even in the confusion of the people who are now going away, even in the neighing of the horses and in the noise of the chariots going far away, even in the shouting of the guards that are running to kill and arrest whoever they can. Those eyes can still see. Caesar, born from gens Iulia, born from Venus, turns his head and sees a face already known to him.

Tiberius, son of Crassus, stands in front of him, watching him while he dies.

In a second Caesar feels like he has deserved every stabbing and, in the same second, past years are coming back to his eyes. He was still young, just a military tribune and Tiberius was just a guy who believed to have the world in his hands.

When was it? When did all that hate between them begin?  
At the beginning it was just a game, a challenge about power and strength, there was just the will not to be dominated by the other and a little bit of fun in between. When Sinuessa en Valle was still occupied by the rebels, or when rebels had just begun to move against their end, it was all still a game, there was just ambition and a will to win.  
Then it all changed.

The world changed. Rome changed, which meant exactly the same thing.

Now, in Tiberius's eyes, years have passed and he's a man. He and Caesar had had an affair for a few years. The triumvirate with Marcus Licinius Crassus and Pompeo had been signed and Tiberius was at his leisure between wars and weapons, passing the years wasted on the fronts of Gaul and Britain.  
Caesar used to come back to Rome, take his glory and go to Tiberius.  
The two of them used to look at each other, like they were meeting by chance, and then they used kiss from anger, fear and homesickness. They used to shout in their chambers, they used to hit each other, they used to fuck each other.   
Hair was pulled, lips were bitten, feelings were hurt by words.  
Every time Caesar cane back to Rome it was the same thing.

How many sheets have they stained with blood, how much have they have hurt each other with their nails, with whatever weapons were at hand? It was until...

_“Tiberius is a man now. I have been indulgent for too many years, I have given him too many years of youth. He will marry a woman!” those were the words of Marcus Crassus, some of the last words he said. Caesar was now happy to have shared poison in the plate of his ally, or he maybe could have done the same after those words. Tiberius was his, no matter how many years Caesar had been abroad, no matter how many years they hadn't seen each other: Tiberius was his property.  
He nodded at the old man's words and then laughed while the same man was agonizing on the floor. He made fun of his pain._

Thinking of that now, on the cold stone floor of Pompeo's Theatre, maybe it wasn't necessary to kill Crassus. But age is guilty of feeling guilty. If he could be twenty again, if he could be alive again, he would have done the same.

_“You killed my father!”_  
“Brilliant deduction, Tiberius.”  
“Don't you touch me!”  
“You say that every time!”  
“Unfortunately for you I have already signed a marriage proposal!”  
Caesar's wrath comes out as he was holding the boy by the collar. But he was not a boy anymore. Just one question could escape the wall of his clenched teeth, like the roar of a wild animal.  
“Who is she?”  
Tiberius looked down on him, derisively, he knew Caesar would never strangle him. He knew he held power on the consul. “Saturnia, the beautiful one. Quintilio's daughter, I may think you know her, don't you?” 

Caesar's first wife's niece. The niece of a wife he had already repudiated.  
He was hoping for something better... no, he was hoping for himself, which was never been possible. 

From that day on, the poison became too much just to be shut up in the bedrooms, and the war, together with the distance, added the little amount of hate that brought the two of them to hate each other from the bottom of their hearts.

Since when he became dictator, however, how may times had he rushed into Tiberius's house and took what the boy refused to give him? Something he could not bear to miss. An absence so painful that age and power had to combine to end it.

The dictator used to enter his room, the guards smashed down the door. Tiberius spat at him, Julius threw him onto his bed and whispered words of hate and derision to him, he used to penetrate him and pretended to know how to love.

Just as the flashbacks had come like lightning, they ended. Caesar can count his last breaths and Tiberius, who is still ten years younger than him, is a mature man. He kneels beside the tyrant and pulls his blood-stained hair. In his eyes, the younger one holds frozen tears – who knows if they are from jealousy or anger, but it is certain that they are not tears of joy or sadness.   
“You see now, dictator” he says, with a broken voice and trembling jaw into the ear of a man who is not able to look at him anymore. “Power is not everlasting. Are you still happy about the glory you earned on the war field? Are you still satisfied about the nights in which you took me with the help of your guards?” he laughs, a laugh of derision, and he pulls himself a bit away but remains kneeling beside that bleeding dying man.

All around the place silence has fallen. Just the wind and the dust are living in that place, isolating them from the rest of the world, and they offer a shelter to both men in their last, tragic act of their story.

Julius Caesar looks at him. With a great effort he swallows and nods. He still does not regret anything he did, and he will not do that just because of an ungrateful death.

“Even your son stabbed you. Are you still not asking yourself why he did so? Do you still not regret anything?” Now it is obvious, that his tears – no longer frozen, but melting down his cheeks, away from his black eyes – are from anger. Tiberius is angry because he is the only one who still has not taken his revenge. Twenty-two stabs are glowing red on that body, but one is missing.

The great senator looks at him, again. “Do it!” he gasps.  
This is what they always do to each other, isn't it?  
They always stab each other for their own purposes. Who cares if this time the stab will be real? The imperator, the pontefix will die anyway.

Tiberius feels his lips trembling, his eyes blinded and his bowels boiling.  
“The thing that hurts the most is that there was a time in which I really thought I could have gone forever waiting for you to mate with me like a savage dog.” He takes a knife which is already hot and stained with blood.  
“Goodbye to you, Caius Julius Caesar of gens Iulia. Go to Hades and pay for your sins!” He almost shouts as he makes the final stab into Caesar's chest. 

The lights turn off in the blue eyes of the dictator and the winds stops blowing, the dust falls to earth as that heart is broken for the last time, or maybe the first. Maybe it was true, maybe he really had never suffered before this day. His eyes are clouding over and he is not strong enough even for a last thought, for a last cry, for the last breath not yet finished. 

Tiberius places a kiss on that no longer living forehead and then he gets up, drying his eyes. He takes his things and goes away from that cursed place, thinking that maybe it would have been better dying that day on the seashore in that mad battle. 

Maybe the rebels were the lucky ones, because they died on the streets of Rome and never lived on them. Fortune is not good to the citizen of the eternal city and his life is still too long, and he has to share it with a wife he does not love and a child which is not his own. 

He stops near a fountain and washes his bloody hands, and he cries again, there is lava on his face. Burning rivers are flowing from his eyes and his mouth is wide open as he sighs. Rome is waking up all around him, news is coming to everyone and the plotters are perhaps already on the sea shore right now.

The young Crassus looks up at the sky, he does not want to know anything. He does not want to know if he really ever loved that arrogant man, he does not want to think about a friend from long ago who he betrayed too many times. Someone in the crowd shouts “This day will be remembered!” ad Tiberius shakes his head.   
He will not be remembered.  
The meaningful details are always forgotten.  
Nobody will ever know about those nights, they are now lying in the twenty-third stab. Finally in the heart of the man who had already stabbed him many many years ago.


End file.
